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MoMA is putting the ink drawing "Flute Player and Reclining Nude" under the hammer to raise money for its acquisitions fund.

The auction house said the work from 1932—which has never before been sold—is one of a series of drawings in which the artist revealed his passion for the French teenager he met in the street in 1927 when she was 17 and he, 46.

Years later, she told how Picasso walked up to her while she was out shopping in Paris and declared, "I am Picasso! You and me are going to do big things together."

"He saw me coming out of the metro and took me by the arm," Walter recalled.

"I was a young innocent girl. I knew nothing—nothing of life nor of Picasso."

"The day that I met Marie-Therese I realised that I had before me what I always dreamed of," Picasso later confessed.